Kiki Smith is among the most admired and significant American artists of her generation. As a feminist artist and activist, she has created a large number of highly memorable sculptures, drawings, collages, and prints in which the human body is imbued with political significance. Smith has often used her own face and body as material for her work, and this practice continues in My Blue Lake, her most important...

Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (1878–1942) is best known for having created animated sculptures that reflect her interest in the everyday lives of immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side. She was particularly drawn to female subjects, especially young girls at play. In Hurdy Gurdy, which she modeled around 1909, Eberle rejected the static forms and grand subjects she had been exposed to at New York’s Art Students...

The mammoth heads that have been the exclusive subject of Chuck Close’s paintings and prints since the 1960s have redefined portraiture during the second half of the twentieth century. Close’s subjects are his family, his friends, himself, and fellow artists, whose faces are shown close-up and rendered through his distinct, meticulous marks. The artist begins by taking black-and-white or color Polaroid photographs of his subjects, which are carefully covered with a grid pattern...

Vietnam: The Real War, Photographs from the Associated Press

Last year, the Associated Press in association with Abrams published a book that looks back at the remarkable photographs taken by AP photographers during the Vietnam War. Titled Vietnam: The Real War, this compilation of photographs from the 1950s...

This untitled work of a mounted Cheyenne warrior dodging rifle bullets is one of the strongest images from the ledger book of the late actor Vincent Price, who collected this rare collection of eighty-six ledger drawings in the early 1960s. The drawings in the Vincent Price Ledger Book, dating from about 1875 to 1878, primarily depict the exploits of Cheyenne warriors during the conflicts of the Indian Wars, when warrior artists used new materials to chronicle the tumultuous changes in Plains life following contact...

The tension between visual punch and global industrial “documentation” is a signature of photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work, and the Hood’s recent acquisition is a stunning example of this. In this photograph, Burtynsky explores the interconnectedness between industrial progress, geological history, and social human history through images of the marks we leave upon the Earth as a result of all three.

The influential and visionary painter Jennifer Bartlett first entered onto the contemporary art scene in the early 1970s with installations of small steel plates coated with white baked enamel, painted with fastidious configurations of dots, and then arranged in grids. Such plate compositions as Rhapsody, first shown in 1976, launched her career but certainly have not come to define it. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Bartlett’s work evolved away from the obsessive control...

Paul Sample (1896–1974), Dartmouth Class of 1920, was Dartmouth’s artist-in-residence from September 1938 until 1962. During that unmatched period of time, he maintained a studio on campus and conducted informal art classes for both students and community members. He also pursued his own art and...

It is not often that a work previously unknown to scholars and painted by a major figure in American art emerges from a private collection and is donated to a museum. Such is the happy case with this engaging portrait of young Ebenezer “Eben” Flagg (1795–1837), half-brother to the artist, Washington Allston (1779–1843) (a 1984 family genealogy noted that...

From about 1935 to her death, Suzy Frelinghuysen produced a remarkable body of work that drew on her intense study of cubism and abstract painting. She applied this avant-garde pictorial language to American subject matter and to musical forms that acknowledged her other career as an accomplished opera singer.

The Hood Museum of Art houses one of the oldest and largest college collections in the country, with more than 65,000 objects from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and many more regions of the world.